Visit Waters Edge Studio on Florence Terrace, the northeast side of Scotland Island. From the road, walk down several, easy steps to the boat shed studio. See Peggy’s sea glass jewellery, and watch her jewellery-making process.
At Waters Edge you will also find works of printmaker book artist, Jan Melville, painter – illustrator David Wardman, and Cheryl Byers’ handcrafted resin bangles and bowls.
Bios: artists at this stop
The sea has always been a big part of Peggy Havukainen’s life. Collecting sea glass was her passion during her childhood growing up on the east coast of the US. Peggy recently rediscovered the treasured sea glass on beaches in Australia and established the Waters Edge Studio at her home on Scotland Island.
She creates her eco friendly, handcrafted jewellery using authentic sea glass and recycled silver. Peggy spends many hours combing the beaches near her home searching for glass, naturally worn smooth and frosted by the action of the sand and sea.
Her island studio, the Pittwater, and her love of the sea provides inspiration for her unique jewellery creations. Peggy is also part of the offshore artists co-op exhibiting at the Gone Fishing Gallery at Church Point.
Jan Melville is a printmaker and book artist living on Scotland Island. In November 2008 she held a 20 year retrospective of her work at the Balmain Watch House. She has had 9 solo exhibitions and more than 3 dozen group exhibitions in her career.
“De Peinture” was the name of her first studio in Johnston Street Balmain where she lived from the 1980′s to 1999. It quickly became the local Saturday afternoon community hub rivalling the nearby pubs.
Then in 1999 she bought “Tara” in the Kangaroo Valley and established The Flying Cow Studio where she held print workshops and started teaching at the Warringah Printmakers Studio where she has taught for almost 11 years.
She is an invited member of the Sydney Printmakers and has had artist residencies in Umbria, Italy and with Cork Printmakers in Ireland.
In September 2011 she is the artist in residence with the Sidney Nolan Trust in Herefordshire, U.K. During her residency at the Nolan estate ‘Rodd’ she will hold workshops in the book arts and assemblage with printmedia.
With her husband David Wardman they have establised a new studio on Scotland Island the Mad Parrot Studio.
David Wardman is an artist in watercolour. His interest lies in understanding the landscape and waterscape and how these two entities interact. David’s images are about the 
meeting of land and water, or the manmade elements that line the foreshore, such as jetties and wharves. In his art he explores how they provide the transition from land to water.
There is an attempt to implant a spiritual dimension into his art, in the way that we might view the edge of the land, where it meets the water, as a sort of point of transformation.
David was born in England in 1946. He is a self-taught watercolour painter. His interest in the medium developed from the use of watercolour in his work as an architectural illustrator. In this field, where watercolour has a long-standing tradition, he found a particular way of working. He finds in landscape painting, often involving waterscapes, watercolour is the medium that intrigues and drives a certain attitude to picture making.
For David there is also an attraction to working with the materials, the lovely handmade papers (600 gsm in weight, or more), the large sable brushes, and the immediacy of the medium.
Landscapes aside, David has practiced architectural illustration for 25 years. He is a design graduate (London), and was originally an interior designer in Sydney and London.
David has lectured in visual communication for designers at the Sydney College of the Arts. He has been a guest lecturer at Sydney University, the University of Technology (UTS), and the Royal Australian Institute of Architects. He is also a founding member of the Australian Association of Architectural Illustrators.
A large number of David’s drawings (illustrations) are in the Modern Architecture Collection of Drawings at the Mitchell Library.
I have lived by the water on Scotland Island most of my life and have always been inspired by the different colours served up each day through the changing weather and times of day. I have in the past captured these changes through photography, painting with water colours and more recently by creating bowls and bangles using hand coloured resin.
The combinations are endless and embedding different objects in the coloured resin gives very pleasing effects in particular pieces of sea glass I’ve collected from the local beaches.
I studied photography at the Australian College of Photography and worked as a Darkroom Technician during the 1980′s specialising in custom hand printed photographs. I have attended water colour art classes enjoying expression through colour over the past decade and more recently learnt the art of making custom hand coloured resin pieces
